Today, leftist Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) called Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia a “homophobe.” But this isn’t about gay rights or homophobia. It’s about the many, many people like Barney Frank who believe that everything they don’t like about life is someone’s fault. It’s about the entitlement pandemic currently ravaging common sense.
Remember when you were a kid and your dad gave you a dollar (or, in my day, a quarter) for the Ice Cream Man? Invariably, the s.o.b. never came on the nights you had that hard, cold cash at the ready. So just after dark, your mom, feeling sorry for you, would fix you a big bowl of store bought ice cream. You ate it, but it wasn’t the same.
Then, just as you scraped out the last drop of semi-coagulated vanilla cream syrup, the bell of the Ice Cream Truck rounded the corner and drifted mockingly through the open kitchen window.
That’s sort of the way life is. Deal with it.
Barney Frank is mad at Scalia because the Founders didn’t see fit to guarantee his particular prurient interest in the Constitution, and he wants Scalia to make up such a guarantee out of whole cloth.
Morally, legally, there’s nothing Scalia can do for Frank. Politically, though, there is. Politically, Scalia could ignore the oaths he’s taken as a federal judge and as a Supreme Court Justice. He could deny his faith–not his church’s teachings on homosexuality and the sanctity of marriage, but is moral obligation to live up to a sworn oath.
Frank, like most of us, wishes the Constitution provided something it does not. I’d like, for instance, the 14th Amendment to explicitly state, “No, this is not a ‘conduit’ between the rest of the Constitutions and the states.” It doesn’t, and the Warren Court invented just such a conduit in the absence of such language.
But Frank and his ilk are spoiled. Since the 1940s, Supreme Courts have forsaken their oaths and lied. They’ve invented Constitutional clauses and Amendments that do not and never did exist. In some cases, they’ve explicitly reversed the intentions of the authors and approvers of clauses and amendments in order to render decisions consistent with their personal predilections or to curry favor with some political class.
Yes, many Supreme Court Justices are liars and scoundrels. Scalia is neither.
Barney Frank, were he at all interested in preserving our republic and honoring rule of law, would praise Scalia’s honor and character in standing up for truth over political expediency.
Technorati Tags: scalia,barney frank,consitution,marriage,sanctity of marriage